I love it when you put a line of washing out in the sun and it's dry as a bone by eleven o' clock in the morning. Shaken and folded and put away as soon as it comes back into the house, and even the last load going out at twenty past three as you say hello to your neighbours coming back from their afternoon walk is sweet-smelling and crisp to your touch when you gather it in after supper.
I've always liked those marginal places, the perimeter of blocks of lock up garages where brambles grow unfettered, swelling and spreading, awash with blossom, bees and hover flies, promising a rich autumn's pickings. The roughly cut verges by allotment gardens, full of sedges and itinerant wild flowers or the shrubby undergrowth, silver birch and hawthorn, springing up by railway sidings.
These early mornings in summer, full of promise, before the rain or the searing heat of later. I like to shop for a chicken for dinner, stuffed with half a head of garlic and a roughly chopped lemon, bronzed and plump on one of my old serving dishes from one charity shop or another. An untidy heap of fresh vegetables, bright jewel colours, tiny new potatoes in their skins. A bottle of white wine, cold and covered in condensation from the fridge. Grapes and cheese, a few walnuts. If visitors are here, a brandy.
Each year, I think about building an oven in the garden, away from the house. A dome of clay on a brick base to hold the firewood. Summer or winter, setting it up to a raging heat and cooking uneven handmade pizzas with a smear of tomato pulp, creamy mozzarella and tiny anchovies, a light dusting of wood ash. Or loaves of bread, climbing over the sides of their pans, dark caramel coloured, or round and shiny, to eat with warm roasted vegetables, eggs with the yolk just set, beans shiny with olive oil and pancetta fat. Or a fat fish, picked up that morning from the fish market in the centre of town, brought to the table whole and ravaged as everyone helps themselves.
I dream about an oasis, a bower, beams covered with festoons of passion flowers, green, purple and white, a small tumbling water feature distracting from the noise of the traffic on the busy road outside, filled with rugs and cushions, tea light lanterns for the evenings, a pre-Raphaelite bazaar of English pastoral and North African souk. At night and in the winter, everything is magicked away, stored in a Homebase locker, like Andy-Pandy back in the toybox.
Writing in a bound book with acid-free pages. Hand-writing with a pen or drawing with pencils. The luxury of reading with a pot of tea and a porcelain cup and saucer sitting on the high-sided tea tray, a small honey cake, glistening with lavender syrup.
Two books take my fancy:
Afropean - Notes from a Black Europe, Johny Pitts
When I first heard it, it encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated: Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or black-other. That being black in Europe didn't necessarily mean being an immigrant.
The margins. The boundaries where creativity and innovation take place.
A hardback with a matte monochrome cover, it could hardly have been more persuasive, although I had ordered the book before I had seen it. At the back, helpful empty pages.
London Belongs to Me, Norman Collins
The girls had most of them already exchanged Christmas cards. There was no obvious reason why they should have done so. They had spent the whole of the previous twelve months sharing the same office, and drinking tea together at eleven o'clock every morning and 3.30 every afternoon, and giving each other pieces of chocolate and aspirins. But for the past two or three days they had been behaving as though they had been parted for years. They had been distributing views of snow-bound coaches and lighted taverns and children toboganning, and robins and boys bearing holly and old bellmen crying 'Oyez' as though Noel and the 18th century were the same thing, and life depended on celebrating both.
The days before open plan factory offices and remote working. I remember Secret Santa, morning coffee and afternoon tea. A subsidised canteen, if you were lucky, or a concrete floored wooden hut with an urn, if you were not.
The sentiments haven't changed, though, just geared up with Christmas songs on a loop from September.
A thick paperback, satin monochrome cover with a grainy photograph. It looks like Clapham Junction. Dense, tiny print filling every page and notes at the end. No expansive empty pages. I shall have to write in the margins.
#sublimesunday with 